Love Me Tender

(lacuna series p. 3)

performance

One night in my studio in Itaewon - a dingy cellar in an old apartment building. I had been working on a series of photographs (Lustre and Hum) and a drawing (Erased Tiger). These were the beginning of a series of works in which I meant to explore a dynamic presence of absence - a deliberate lacuna at the centre of each work. I did not know exactly why I was doing this.

I was aware of a door in the studio space that had been painted shut. I resolved to open this door. I managed with considerable effort to do so. A musty odour issued from the small space behind it. My eyes adjusted to the darkness but slowly - it was as if light was only tentatively entering the space in small increments. As soon as there was a clear view of the interior I discovered a profusion of anaemic spiders in various states of decay hanging from dusty spiderwebs all over the space. Their colour somewhere between bone white and translucent. Husks of tubular legs mangled in pathetic confusion around their own webs and desiccated bodies falling apart in the air. I became aware of the fact that the dust that was settling on my face this moment must to some extent be that of spiders. A brief respite of fascination came over me like I had been allowed to survey a bloom of jellyfish incongruously passing through my studio space but the reality of these ghostly spiders returned immediately and I shut the door again.

I made a video to mark the occasion. A familiar trope of a song is performed on camera and the sound edited out to leave an audience with only a phantasmal version of this song that the title and the silent performance induce on their own.